A watch that displays time on both Earth and Mars

Looking for a gift for the NASA Mars rover flight controller in your life who has everything? Executive Jewelers makes watches that display Martian time, and watches with dual displays so you know what time it is on Mars *and* Earth, at a glance. (via @milesobrien)

• [Peter Hollo]

  I like how only one of the three categories is for “Novelty Mars Watches”…

• [papiermeister]

  beautiful watches, yes, but for $700 I want my two Earth faces in perfect sync. The pic shows the top Earth face with the lunar cycle to be 3 minutes fast. Also, what is the start of the Sol calendar? what is sunrise and sunset on any given *Sol* (Martian day)? how do you set the Martian time face? We have arbitrarily set August 6, 2012 as Sol 1 for Curiosity, but that does not make it *New Year’s Day* (Sol) for the red planet, right? Just want to be accurate when my co-workers ask me what time it is on Mars. And what *day* (Sol) it is up there. Probably need to go back and read my Kim Stanley Robinson to get clear on the time zones of Mars Vs Earth…

  • [Jake Reynolds]

    If it went with the system Kim Stanely Robinson envisioned you’d just need a regular 24 hour clock that stopped for ~1/2 hour every day

• [Nylund]

   The whole concept of time on Mars is actually a weird idea…does one say that a day is 24 hours and 39 minutes long?  Or do you still make it 24 hours long, but each hour (and thus each minute, second, etc.) is a different amount of time than an Earth minute/second/hour/etc.?

  One second on Earth is the same as one second on a space ship, right? (ignoring the whole relativity thing.)  But suddenly, a second is longer the moment you land on Mars?

  So if a watch did both, would it have to sets of mechanics since the seconds/minutes/hours of one planet are different from the seconds/minutes/hours of another?

  And if the watch has a date feature, what the heck does it use?  The Darian Calendar?

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar

  And what the heck is Mars time?  MTC, time at the Prime Meridian, makes the most sense, but really, Mars has many times, just like Earth is many times across the many time zones.

  • [penguinchris]

    This is, surely, the inherent flaw of this watch – anyone who would be interested in one is definitely also going to be interested in over-thinking how it should work.

    I imagine, though, that you can just sync it with whatever NASA says. The time zone doesn’t really matter, it’s just wherever the Curiosity rover is and the sun cycle relative to it.

• [andygates]

  If those watches implement KSR’s Martian Timeslip, I’m sold.  I can’t help imagining the rovers going off for thirty-nine minutes of unlogged activity, surprising the mission staff when they come back online pointed in a totally different direction having scribbled naughty grafitti in the dust with a probe.  :)

  • [Michael Smith]

     I bought by dad the solder time LED watch kit. Maybe we should look into reflashing it to do time for multiple planets.

• [ChickieD]

  I posted this in another comment, but my high school classmate, David Oh, is ACTUALLY Lead Flight Controller for the Mars Rover. His family is moving to Mars time while the mission is going on: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81141

• [Edille Rosario]

  very cool watch :) like them really.

• [Glen Kiltz]

  Mars would have 24 different time zones, as does the Earth.  The Earth truthfully has 25 due to the fact that the seasons reverse in the Southern Hemisphere, and the “Spring/Summer(Right now Northern) hemisphere is always on daylight savings time.